诺贝尔化学奖授予分子手性研究先驱

Many molecules come in mirror images, like right and left hands. Yet the stuff of life, from the amino acids in proteins to the sugars in DNA, is single-handed, or chiral. How this asymmetry arose has been a mystery, because ordinary chemical reactions tend to produce equal amounts of the two mirror images. Last week’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry honors Henri Kagan of Paris-Sud University and Kenso Soai of the Tokyo University of Science for discovering how chemistry can break that symmetry—and for providing clues to how life’s single-handedness might have developed. Controlling chirality is vital in the pharmaceutical industry, because the mirror-image form of a drug molecule can have very different biological effects. …